Inside Verndale Tech Talks

Maria Jose Escalante,Project Manager & Technical Business Analyst

The Verndale Quito team has been building its presence in the local tech community over the last few years. By working with several cutting-edge technologies, processes, and methodologies, our team has been able to share knowledge about a wide range of topics, and now, we will continue to be an integral part of Quito's tech community by introducing a series of knowledge share events - Verndale Tech Talks! Our motto for our event series is "Quality before Quantity" - we are focused on the content and experience we will provide to our audiences through these community based, group think sessions.

We held our first Tech Talk recently, which addressed back-end trending topics such as .Net Core, S.O.L.I.D principles and an introduction to .NET Content Management Systems with Sitecore. We addressed topics on the front-end development side in our second Tech Talk named "Tools to Speed Up Development and Bridge the Gap with UX/XD". This specific talk was a huge success as attendance doubled from our previous Tech Talk - we can't wait to see our Tech Talk series continue to evolve.

FE SERIES

Our Front-End Series is meant to hold a serial delivery of tech talks about libraries, modules, tools and any other resource that helps and relieves the daily work of any front-end engineer. Our first Tech Talk from the FE series was about development environments and design to code tools featuring our experienced Front End Engineers: Diego Zuñiga, Estefanía Regalado and David Bergmann. Please be sure to view the streamed event!

DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS FOR FE

"There is not a silver bullet when we talk about the best environment for front end development" was one of the key statements from Diego, acknowledging that each project will require a different set of tools depending on its requirements. However, given his proven experience he demoed live (so adventurous!) how NodeJS works as server/backend bundle with webpack and how it can help to resolve the dependency nightmare that can happen while working on front end deliverables and not having to work with browsers for deploying and debugging.

DESIGN TO CODE TOOLS

When David asked, "Who has not struggled while working with design assets?", the audience confirmed its hardships in unison. That statement confirmed the struggles the front end developers face whenever working with several formats like .psd, .ai, .sketch without having a clear view of the inner items of the design. But, the team presented an option to relieve this stress, Avocode, a tool that has taken away the load of inspecting the design elements in a primitive way. Estefania showed how easy is to work with a type of tool that translates and exports assets with one click, again reducing the development time in about 15 minutes for each template.

NEXT MOVE

With the awesome quality content presented on our last meetup and the positive feed back we received from attendees, we are already planning the next event. This time, we are trying to bake in some other revolutionary ingredients. You can find us at https://www.meetup.com/verndale-tech-talks/, so stay tuned for our next meetup!